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My API Story Campaign: Freedom to innovate with agility

Phil Moss, Senior Product Manager, MATRIXX Software, explains how TM Forum's Open APIs are helping to simplify integration projects for communications service providers.

Ailis Claassen
08 Jun 2023
My API Story Campaign: Freedom to innovate with agility

My API Story Campaign: Freedom to innovate with agility

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Tell us about yourself and your job

As part of the MATRIXX Product Lifecycle Management team, I drive our Digital Commerce Platform (DCP) roadmap to increase alignment with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and to fulfil our commitments as a signatory of the Forum’s Open API Manifesto. This includes working with our customers, prospects and other TM Forum members, to maximize the value of MATRIXX DCP in an operator’s ecosystem through the implementation of TM Forum Open APIs. As well as benefiting MATRIXX and our customers, I value the opportunity to contribute to the evolution of the Open APIs.

Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?

As a software product company, MATRIXX does not benefit from long, complex integration projects or requests for customization. Our goal is for our customers to deploy and launch as soon as possible and for the flexibility of the platform to provide the freedom to innovate with agility.

Standardization and interoperability are key to achieving the goal of plug and play IT and networks. As a result, the TM Forum Open API program provides a real opportunity to simplify our integration projects, and accelerate the introduction of new and innovative products and services for service providers end-to-end.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?

  • TMF677 Usage Consumption Management
  • TMF640 Service Activation & Configuration

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

There are many TM Forum Open APIs which add value that we have already implemented and will continue to implement through our roadmap. These two examples allow us to demonstrate the flexibility and performance of our platform whilst supporting fundamental capabilities needed in every monetization deployment.

How do you use those APIs?

Through its real-time rating and balance management capability, MATRIXX DCP maintains an always-accurate view of a user’s consumption and spend. Our TMF677 implementation provides a mechanism for Self-Care, CRM and other applications, to retrieve that rich information and present it to end users in a synchronous manner as part of a fully digital experience.

A significant part of any integration project is the implementation of provisioning use cases where subscriptions are created and maintained to fit the needs of each individual customer. Order Management, CRM, Self-Care and more are involved, and so interoperability is key. TMF640 provides a flexible interface to simplify and standardize these use cases, allowing DCP to work efficiently within the operator ecosystem, significantly reducing the time and cost of implementation.

How have you benefited from using those APIs?

These APIs have recently been introduced into our product and we are currently working to implement them with our customers. The benefits are already clear: Our integration teams have more time to focus on business use cases instead of technical integration concerns.

Where do you use them?

We currently use our TM Forum Open APIs in demonstrations. For example, TMF640 is part of our Dynamic Monetization of 5G and Edge Resources demo with Blue Planet.

We’re also working with Telus in Canada where TMF640, TMF677 and soon TMF635, will form part of our integration.